My Conversion Experience (April 2005)

(Taken from a service led at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Sterling, VA, July 31, 2005)

At one of our last CD group meetings in April, a group member asked me how I could basically believe in a Father type and a Holy Ghost type, but not The Son. I said I could feel a Father and a Holy Ghost in my heart and soul, but I could not feel The Son. “But you act like a Christian and talk like a Christian,” said my friend. I laughed. I could only imagine what other students thought UUs talked and acted like.

My friend explained there is no God and no Holy Ghost without Christ.

Suddenly I was engulfed in warmth and comfort unlike anything I had ever felt before. What I experienced was much like Symeon, a monk in the late 10th/early 11th century wrote about in The Discourses:

“I was so greatly moved to tears and loving desire for God that I would be unable to describe in words the joy and delight I then felt. I fell prostrate on the ground, and at once I saw. . . . a great light was . . . . shining on me and seized hold of my whole mind and soul, so that I was struck with amazement at the unexpected marvel and I was, as it were, in ecstasy.

“There was poured into my soul in unutterable fashion a great spiritual joy and perception and a sweetness surpassing every taste of visible objects, together with a freedom and forgetfulness of all thoughts pertaining to this life.”

Now you can say these examples are just unexplained phenomena. But why are we so quick to discount the unexplained as events that science just hasn’t figured out yet? Can we get to a place where we accept both faith and reason, or do we continue to see these as mutually exclusive?

In a recent sermon, Forrest Church said, “Fundamentalists of every faith claim that the Light—God, Truth, call it what you will—shines through their window only. “ He went on to say, “Skeptics draw the opposite conclusion. Seeing the bewildering variety of windows . . . . they conclude that there is no light. But the windows are not the light. They are where the light shines through.”

Church concluded, “This metaphor is a perfect description of Unitarian Universalism. One Light (Unitarianism) shines through many windows (Universalism), illuminating human minds and hearts in many different ways. In our congregations we honor this truth by encouraging our members to reflect on the Light through whatever set of windows they find most illuminating. We only require that this same freedom be honored for others.”

Church’s words are certainly consistent with our third principle, “Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations,” as well as one of our stated sources of inspiration, “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.”


Our challenge as a denomination, I believe, is to practice what Church is preaching. We seem to have a large, accepting tent when it comes to Wiccans or Pagans or Atheists, but a less welcoming hand toward Christians or people who even admit being comfortable with the “G” word. I want Church’s words to be true, that in our congregations we respect the different ways that we experience illumination in our minds and hearts. I don’t want my brothers and sisters in Unitarian Universalism to believe what a UU seminarian told me recently when I told him I was opening myself to the possibility of a relationship with The Son, “Oh no, we’ve lost one to the other side.”

From Mystical Theology by Pseudo-Dionysius

direct us to the mystical summits

more than unknown and beyond light,

there the simple, absolved, and

unchanged mysteries of theology

lie hidden in the darkness beyond light

of the hidden mystical silence,

there, in the greatest darkness,

that beyond all that is most evident

exceedingly illuminates the sightless

intellects,

there, in the wholly imperceptible and invisible,

that beyond all that is most evident

fills to overflowing the sightless intellects

with the glory beyond all beauty.